d me
throughout the putting together of this book, which I have called,
from that haunting remembrance, and, perhaps, a little also that the
association might make it more pleasant in your eyes, by the name of
that strange, isolated, ilex-circled castle villa of Belcaro. And now,
unroll the tight-rolled manuscript and smooth out the rumpled proof
sheets; read, and tell me whether or not what you have read is ever to
be read by any one else.

FLORENCE, _May, 1881_.

THE CHILD IN THE VATICAN.

There were a lot of children in the Vatican this morning: small
barbarians scarce out of the nursery, who should have been at home,
at their lessons, or reading fairy books, or carpentering, or
doll-educating, or boat-sailing, or amusing themselves in the hundred
nondescript ways which we seem to forget (remembering only ready-made
toys and ready-made stories) when we grow up. Some were left to their
own devices, and scampered, chattering and laughing, through the
gallery; jumping up three steps at a time, clambering up to windows,
running round isolated statues, feretting into all the little nook and
corner rooms, peeping into the lidless sarcophagi and the great porphyry
baths, with the rough-hewn rings and lions' heads. The others were being
led by their elders: talking in whispers, or silent: demure, weary,
vacant, staring about with dreary, vague little faces; these, who were
not permitted to rush about like the others, seemed chilled, numbed
by a sort of wonder unaccompanied by curiosity, oppressed by a sense
of indefineable desolation. And, indeed, it is a desolate place, this
Vatican, with its long, bleak, glaring corridors; its half-lit, chill,
resounding halls; its damp little Belvedere Court, where green lichen
fills up the fissured pavement; a dreary labyrinth of brick and
mortar, a sort of over-ground catacomb of stones, constructed in our
art-studying, rather than art-loving times where once--when Michael
Angelo was stretched painting on the creaking scaffolding slung from
the roof of the Sixtine--the poppies waved scarlet among the trailing
vines of the pope's orchard, and the white butterflies, like wind-blown
blossoms, swarmed in the tall grass beneath the bending apple trees, and
the fire-flies danced in luminous spirals among the wild rose-hedges.
A dismal scientific piece of ostentation, like all galleries; a place
where art is arranged and ticketed and made dingy and lifeless even as
are the plants